ToorAdmin – Blog

Toornament evolves

As you may have noticed, we rebranded the website last week. This is the first step of a full-scale evolution for Toornament in the coming months and years. We are indeed moving to a business-to-business (B2B) model, relying on our robust tournament engine to provide organizers with all the tools they need to create and manage their esports competitions in the best conditions.
As such, we decided to deliver our software as a service (SaaS), with premium features packaged in paid plans tailored for professional organizers.

For the amateur and esports enthusiasts, rest assured that Toornament will still provide access to the core features of the organizer software for free, for you to organize a tournament on any game, for your friends and communities.

Thank you for your continued support and trust in this adventure, and we will be back soon with more exciting news about what is yet to come!

The Toornament engine gets expanded with new tiebreakers

Today, we are adding new in-depth tiebreakers to the Toornament engine, to let organizers fine tune their competitions by setting up detailed points attribution and tiebreaker rules.

Newly added tiebreakers can be regrouped in three categories:

Game-based tiebreakers (16 new tiebreakers): you can now break the ties based on the score and results of individual games within matches (say for example the number of rounds won in a CS:GO BO3 match).
Match losses new scope (8 new tiebreakers): The new game-based tiebreakers are now also available for the matches that a participant has lost. This is for the organizers that wish to encourage participants to fight tooth and nail even in defeat, and reward those that lose while putting up a good fight.
Swiss exclusive modified Buchholz (5 new tiebreakers): These ones go to our organizers that use the Swiss stages, and provide them with more options when it comes to calculating Buchholz tiebreakers, by applying it depending on the match results.

This brings the total number of available tiebreakers to 50 on the platform, that you can setup in any order and combination, for countless possibilities.
See our revamped comprehensive Tiebreaker Guide to learn more about these new tiebreakers, and see all that Toornament has to offer.

Final Standings and Leaderboards are available on Toornament

We are happy to announce that a new feature is available for all tournaments on the platform: the Final Standing.
Organizers are now able to declare, at the end of their tournament, the final rank of each participant, so that everyone knows full well how the participants fared in the competition.

This also comes with a new API endpoint that lets you retrieve the standing to display the way you see fit on your own website. It also allows you to build seasonal or circuit leaderboards, by applying points to the different ranks for example. That is what we did on the Gears Esports platform, where each region now has its own Leaderboard that is automatically updated with the tournaments final standing points that are tied to the region.

Other exciting new features and improvements are planned for this year, so stay tuned not to miss anything!

Austrian eBundesliga on Toornament

Skilled Events GmBH is an Austria-based esports company with 15 years of experience in the field. They are working with the Esports Federation of Austria to provide players all across the country with great and compelling competitions, and are notably the organizers of the biggest e-soccer league in Austria, the eBundesliga, in cooperation with the official Bundesliga.
In their search of the ideal platform to manage the competition, they found in Toornament the best alternative, thanks to our advanced engine and API. They had to be able to handle multiple qualifiers, a custom registration process and other complex challenges, all made possible thanks to our solution.

The eBundesliga website is a custom-made platform with deep Toornament integration. The registration happens directly on the website, and players can then register in tournaments depending on their place of residence and club. The tournament registration process is easy and quick thanks to the API that takes care of sending the needed information. Then, email and text notifications are sent to the players for the important steps of the competition.

During the tournaments, live results are displayed on broadcast and in live venues. This is again entirely automated, without the need for any manual refresh, and information is always up to date, and error-free.

The second season started in December 2019, and ended early February, with the crowning of the FC Red Bull Salzburg in the Team tournament, and Marcel Holy in the Solo tournament. This was the outcome of a circuit that started with 12 qualifiers, one for each of the main soccer clubs participating in the competition, and ended with a Main Event in Vienna.

Contact us if you wish to learn more about how to build an esports universe around your game or brand, thanks to our tournament engine and advanced features!

The Legends of Runeterra Open Beta is out!

As you might have heard already, Legends of Runeterra, the Trading Card Game by Riot Games is releasing in Open Beta today, with accounts wiped for the last time.
This new game follows Teamfight Tactics in the will of Riot Games to develop their catalog around their IP, and the game seems really promising, with mechanics that come from the best Card Games, and mixed in a new and interesting gameplay.

The game also looks like it’s going to be a great competitive game, with a thriving esports scene, with its depth and complexity allowing for interesting match-ups and an evolving meta. To accompany this journey into esports, we plan on integrating the game with Toornament, to make the lives of organizers and participants easier by facilitating the experience of managing and playing in Legends of Runeterra tournaments.

The game will be available as soon as 19:00 (CEST), so get ready to build your best Demacia or Noxus decks, and you can start organizing your Legends of Runeterra tournaments right away!

A new LOL official league happening on Toornament!

On this day last year, we announced our partnership with Riot Games for the French League, entirely managed via Toornament, and with a custom website we built for them.
This partnership is carrying on, and it gets better, as it has been extended to the 2nd Division of the French League. This means that Toornament is now the go-to platform for the whole circuit in France, from the LOL students league to the pro players that have a shot at the LEC.

This new website dedicated to the 2nd Division comes with a brand new design, but retains the features and navigation of its 1st Division counterpart, to create a coherent environment for players and spectators alike.

We are pleased and proud to be the official solution chosen by Riot Games for the entire French esports ecosystem, and we have other exciting things to come working closely with them!

Happy New Year in 4 new languages!

🇧🇷 Feliz Ano Novo !
🇵🇱 Szczęśliwego Nowego Roku !
🇪🇸 Feliz año nuevo !
🇩🇪 Frohes neues Jahr !

We kick the new year with four new languages for the platform, which are 🇧🇷 Portuguese (Brazil), 🇵🇱 Polish, 🇪🇸 Spanish and 🇩🇪 German. We are confident this will help organizers advertise their competitions in countries with these languages, and plan on adding more as time goes, to make Toornament even more accessible to the crowds.

We have spent a lot of time refining and discussing the translations, but do not hesitate contacting us if you spot mistakes or have comments or feedback about texts or translations!
And also, let us know what language you would like to see next on the platform!

May 2020 bring you great things and healthy competitions!

Use Case: LANA France

Today we want to introduce one of our first ever professional organizers, LANA France, a nonprofitable association that has been created in 2000, organizing events around video games. They made a name for themselves during the great era of LAN Parties (with the MaxLan), and now accompany communities in creating their events and exhibitions, by bringing them expertise and skills relevant to esports tournaments.

Here to talk more in depth about their experience is Cyril Grosjean, VP of LANA France:
We have been using Toornament since 2013 to manage our competitions (around a hundred now). It made the whole management, registration and communication process way easier for us.

On our latest project, Moselle Gaming Network, we needed a new feature to let participants choose their city of participation from a list of allowed cities. Indeed, this League of Legends competition was held simultaneously across 5 cities, and only participants from these cities were allowed to take part.
We then used the Toornament API to build a custom registration form directly on our website.

The advantages of this solution were numerous:
– We could build the feature in a few hours, tailored to our needs
– We now have the players only using our website, and do not need to have them go to and from Toornament and our own website, which prevented confusion sometimes felt by some of our younger players
– We could communicate entirely on our own media and networks, controlling the entire process and user experience

In the future, we plan on integrating Toornament even further in our websites, to allow for a fully white-label experience, with all tournament information being directly available on our website, which we know is possible thanks to Toornament.

Thank you Cyril for your time and insight on the work of an organizer, and congratulations the great environment you provide to your players!

What was up on Toornament in 2019?

2019 was quite a year for Toornament. For us, it was all about leveraging our B2B technology to create the best esports platforms. And we succeeded big time, by working with some of the biggest names in the industry, to offer players and organizers all around the world the tools and environment they need for their esports journey.

Business

First off, there were quite a few large scale tournament operations held on the platform, with Red Bull Player One 2019, the Mastercard Nexus Tournament and the Burger King by x6tence tournaments among others.

We have also worked directly with game publishers to create their esports platforms, such as the Splatoon 2 Tournaments platform for Nintendo, a complete national environment for Riot Games with the Grosse Ligue, targeted at students, and the two divisions of the LOL French League to find the pro players that will play in the LEC and the Rainbow 6 French League for Ubisoft.

Last, but not least, we have been working hands in hands with the teams from The Coalition, Xbox and PGL to develop, maintain and improve the Gears Esports Platform, a complete ecosystem for the Gears community, to play competitively, get to the top rank of your region and become a Pro Gears player.

Updates

To make all of these projects possible, and make the experience of everyone using our technology the best possible, we kept updating and improving it all year long.
Among the major changes, we have added new bracket structures: Gauntlet and Free-for-All. We also made visual optimizations to better display all brackets on the website.

The API, upon which are built all the business projects, also received plenty of love with the addition of Webhooks and the Open-Api Specification. This makes it easier than ever to build entire websites based on our technology, and allows for even more customization and automation.

2019 has been a great year for Toornament, and we already have plans to top that in 2020! Thank you for staying with us, and get ready for another exciting year in esports!

Toornament enables the E.V.A world first VR Stadium tournament

In our effort to accompany all esports initiatives that come our way, we have worked with the team of Esports Virtual Arenas to deliver a world first for players and spectators alike: a competition played in a Virtual Reality Esports Stadium.

It was played on After-H, a free team-based VR shooter accessible to all owners of VR headsets, playable in large-scale arcade setups for a truly immersive experience, like what we saw during the Paris Games Week:

The tournament started online with a qualification phase, and the finals were played live in the EVA Stadium. The management of the participants and structure was made easy thanks to Toornament, along with the communication around the results and schedule, thanks to our sharing modules:

“We were looking for an easy way to organize and keep track of our After-H competitions; and Toornament has provided us exactly that! We can now open registrations for a tourney in no time, update the tournament results as the games are being played and integrate customized widgets in our blog posts. Everybody can browse through the competition history, which comes very handy when live streaming phases of the tournament. Ever since we’ve started using Toornament for our competitive events, we’ve seen VR arcade doing the same and organize their own internal After-H championships via Toornament!“, says Eloïse BEUVANT, Communication Director at EVA.

We strongly believe that VR has its place in the esports landscape, among the giants that are the MOBA, Shooters and other Card Games. We can not wait to see what the future holds with actors like EVA paving the way, providing them and their community with the tools they will need to develop the scene.